Consumer Electronics

If you like VoIP and Star Trek do I have a blog entry for you. TMCnet’s Tom Keating writes up (turn down your speakers) what is happening with the shut down of SunRocket. Somehow he gets numerous Star Trek references in the post.
One issue he discusses is how the company is or is not notifying customers. I personally don’t know any of the company’s customers so I am unaware of what the company has done in this area.

Many of us are familiar with VoSky Technologies the company behind the business class Skype gateways allowing a company to leverage the myriad benefits of Skype within their corporate communications infrastructure. If you need to catch up, I invite you to read an article written on the topic of Skype trunking by yours truly about a month ago.
So while Skype and VoSky are likely familiar names, most people are likely not aware of the fact that the company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Actiontec Electronics, a leading provider of broadband connectivity solutions for consumers and broadband service providers.
In a recent meeting with Lesley Kirchman Director of Marketing and Brian Henrichs VP of Business Development for the company I became aware the company’s tagline is “Solutions For a Digital Life.”
The company has been around since 1993 when it was in the analog modem business. Over time they evolved to do what a few companies have been successful at… Listening to telco needs, delivering on them and actually having the telcos buy.
The company has sold over five million devices and has roughly 300 people in their Sunnyvale, CA headquarters in the US. I think of the company as the Linksys of the service provider world as they sell gateways in countless DSL varieties, IPTV solutions and even FiOS solutions for Verizon.
Some of the more recent products allow you to transport data and entertainment within a house via wireless, HomePlug and numerous other technologies.
Another area of focus is technologies such as TR69 and WT140 which help can enhance the consumer experience.

When a single US phone company, Verizonreports that in one month, they were responsible for sending 10 billion text messages, you may want to stand up and take notice.
In order to learn more about the SMS space I decided to take a trip down to Plano, Texas where the UK-based Acision has one of it’s four US offices. The company was formerly named Logica CMG and is one of those companies most people never heard of but is responsible for providing technology many of us frequently use.
In short, the company is an enabler of various types of service provider messaging from SMS to voice and video. This month in fact the company celebrated it’s 15th anniversary of supplying the industry with Short Message Service Centers or SMSCs.
Thanks to Moore’s law and clever design, the capability of Acision’s SMSCs has dramatically increased over the years. In 1992 SMSC version 1.0 had a capacity of 10 messages per second.

Instant IMS: No IMS Required
When I decided on the sub headline for this article I realized it might be viewed as potentially controversial. How, you may be asking can one have IMS without IMS? Well there is an answer to this question and it may or may not be what you are expecting.
You see the benefits of IMS are great. We all realize this fact and moreover service providers understand if they aren’t able to provide the benefits of IMS to their customers soon they risk losing revenue.

Here is my August 2007 Publisher’s Outlook for Internet Telephony Magazine. It may be one of the longest pieces I have written in a while and it was great fun to put together and hopefully is something you will appreciate.
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In 1997 or so I regularly met with Microsoft executives in charge of the company’s telephony initiatives. At the time Mitch Goldberg and Mark Lee were the top spokesmen the Redmond-based software giant offered up to discuss where the company’s products fit into the telephony ecosystem. If you have been in telecom longer than seven years you likely remember the industry was once dominated by computer telephony integration (CTI) technologies allowing PCs and servers to talk with telephone switches.

Yesterday I blogged about the SunRocket bankruptcy and I mentioned how although pure-play VoIP is not easy, a company like 8x8/Packet8 is doing a good job. Today I came across an article on TMCnet discussing how Packet8 is the preferred replacement service for SunRocket customers.
I queried the company’s VP of Marketing, Huw Rees about what this means and why customers should switch. Most importantly I asked whether a pure play VoIP provider can be successful. Huw has some good points which follow below.
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Packet8 is the preferred replacement service by SunRocket...